GOP freshmen flex their muscles

It can take years to find out where some lawmakers stand on crucial economic, political and social issues. Not this class of freshman Republicans.

They already have cast votes on abortion, environmental regulation, warplanes, the new health care law, labor-management relations and virtually every other hot-button issue Congress can handle. And they did it all on one bill: a seven-month spending measure that would cut $61 billion from federal accounts.

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A new POLITICO analysis of the 105 votes on amendments and final passage of the spending bill offers an accelerated introduction to the political leanings and policy preferences of a class that often moves in near lock step. The votes paint a portrait of a freshman class that is more aggressive on budget cutting than the Republican Conference as a whole, more hostile toward organized labor, less accepting of federal environmental protections and divided over how and when to cut funding for national defense, police forces and firefighting. And it’s clear the vote-a-rama gave the freshmen a strong sense of both the potential and limits of their own collective clout.

“We understand that we’re not going to get it all our way,” said freshman class president Austin Scott (R-Ga.). “We have no intentions of operating as an independent caucus. What you have is 87 people who have common goals of working for [the] next generation; that’s why our voting records are so similar. It’s not that we’re bloc voting so much as we’re people who are voting for the next generation.”

The newbies are trying to project themselves as fiscal hawks who desperately want to cut from the spending side of the ledger.

“There’s a unity of purpose that it needs to be done,” said 32-year-old Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), who won an open-seat race to succeed Democrat Brian Baird. “We’re hanging together.”

But perhaps to a surprising degree, they also vote together on issues that aren’t clear-cut budget matters. Forty-three of the 80 Republican freshmen POLITICO studied sided with the majority of their class on more than 90 percent of the votes on the massive appropriations bill. And 72 voted with their class at least 80 percent of the time.

The sample excluded lawmakers who have served nonconsecutive terms or first came to Washington in special elections held in the last Congress, making the total number 80, rather than the oft-cited 87 freshman Republicans.